The Surgeon and the Chaplain had been bidden to roast beef and mashed potatoes in the great tent; and the former, leaving its pleasant firelight, had come out through the night air a little before taps, to spread himself and his triumphs in the eyes of the officers' mess. The Surgeon was a widower in his early prime, and tenderly condescending to the known ways of women. He talked much of the two who in that camp represented all inscrutable womankind, Miss Cecily Carter and Mrs. Willoughby. They had come from New York on a visit, Braleton being just then in profound quiet. The Surgeon adored Miss Cecily, in which mood he was by no means alone; but he had his own opinion of her sister, the Colonel's wife. "The Sultan has hinges in him, and can unbend," he would say; "but the Sultana—O Jerusalem, my Happy Home!" He had also discovered that the train of trunks at the sutler's, objects of deep and incessant objurgation, were hall-marked "A. W.," and that Miss Cecily came to the war with one hand-bag. His auditors sat long astride their chairs, each in his hood of good government tobacco-smoke. The Adjutant's silver-coated hound was asleep on the boards, still as a little mountain-tarn among thunder-clouds. The gusts of genial mirth were suddenly interrupted from without by the even voice of the orderly: "Sergeant Blanchard is wanted at the Colonel's quarters."
A young man playing chess in the corner arose at once, and followed. All along the company streets, the lamp-light streamed through the chinks in the tents; charming tenors and basses, at the far end, were laying them down and deeing for Annie Laurie; and from the long sheds nigh, in the grove, came the subdued pawing and tossing of the horses. Robert Blanchard saluted, and stood outside in the dark, for the Colonel was in his doorway. "They have sent another commission for you," he said shortly. "You deserve it; your behavior has been admirable, a source of immense pride to me, and to all my men." The Sergeant looked at him with a visible gladness. "I thank you. You know I prefer not to be promoted." "I have humored you no fewer than three times before," resumed the Colonel, in an altered tone; "I can't do it always. You are known; the General has complimented you. The rise of a man of your stamp can't be prevented, even by himself. You are meant, if you live, to move rapidly, and go high. This second-lieutenantship is the lowest step; mount it, in Heaven's name, and don't maunder."
The other hesitated, silent. Then he said: "May I have my condition, if I accept,—may I remain color-bearer?" "I can promise nothing of the kind. I fear it would be unusual, to say the least; it has no precedent in any service that I ever heard of. Don't ask me that again." Blanchard, in sober fashion, brought his hand to his cap. "Good-evening, Colonel." The superior officer was exasperated. "Bob," he exclaimed discursively, "you're a fool. God bless you!"The drums began, quick and light; it was nine o'clock. The Sergeant went back, cheerful as Cincinnatus refusing empery. Before he confided himself to his blanket, lumped on boughs, he made sure that a fold of old bunting on a provisionary stick was slanted securely against the canvas; for he had a sentimental passion for the flag. When it was hauled down at sunset, it went into his hands until daybreak. He had borne it in the van since his first bloody day at Little Bethel; it had been riddled, stained, smoke-blackened, snapped from its support; but he had never dropped it, not when a minie-ball fizzed through his shoulder, not when, fresh from the hospital, he had fallen face downward from his dying horse, in Beauregard's plunging fire of shell. In this lad of twenty-two there burned a formal loyalty so intense, so rooted in every fibre of his grave character, that his comrades, for whom military routine had lost much of its glamour, loved him for it, envied him, and consistently nagged the life out of him with the nickname of Our Colored Brother, and other nicknames based on other puns more or less felicitous. Because in New York, they had several dear friends in common, the Colonel, on the morning of the ladies' arrival at Braleton, had asked him to lunch with them. "My Sergeant, Adela," so James Willoughby, in his eagles, presented him to the wife of his bosom, "my Sergeant; and such a Sergeant!" For he read in her tacticianary social eye that a Sergeant was a minnow indeed for a Colonel's friend and guest, even if he were a gentleman, a cousin of the Windhursts, and the hero of his corps. And she wondered at him the more that he should be a mere color-bearer; a spirited able-bodied creature two years in the army, with nothing to show for it! He had no explanation to give her, but he had an unaccountable hunger, from the first, to confide his secret to Cecily. He had seen her from a distance, and his heart stood still there in the grass; when he came nearer, it gave him, for a certain reason, the veriest wrench in all his life, such as True Thomas may have felt when the sweet yet awful call came to him at last in the market-place, that it was time to say good-bye to earth, and go back to fairyland; to leave for the things which can never be the things that are. He often found her sewing on a silken tri-color, and working its correct number of stars in a pattern. She had begun it in her father's house, for her brother-in-law's regiment, and none too soon, for the flag in use was aging fast. Robert Blanchard never saw her head bent over that bright glory, filling her lap and falling around her feet, without a tightening of the throat. And when she nodded to him going by, with that candid, affectionate grace which never changed, it reminded him inevitably of something which made him happy and unhappy. He could not remember, he said to himself, when he had not loved her, and yet they had never met until this Virginian winter of 1863.
Cecily had taken up her abode in a wee log-house built for her as an ell from the Colonel's tent, delighting much in its frugalities and small hardships. She was becoming attached to the sights and sounds of camp-life: the tags and tassels, the shining accoutrements, and the endless scouring and brushing thereof; the rosy drummer-boy; the company drills in the rain; the hollow pyramids of the stacked short bayonets; the muddy wells on the bluish and reddish lowlands; the loud sing-song of the little bearded Corporal interruptedly reading David Copperfield to a ring of enraptured privates; the welcome drone of the cook announcing his menu; the arrival of despatches, with the thundering and jingling of the cavalry heard a mile away; even the occasional alarms. The long inactions under McClellan, hateful to her mettlesome brother-in-law and to his men, proved pleasant enough to Cecily; she never lacked entertainment. While Adela was at her accurate toilets, and the Colonel, a severe disciplinarian, busy with his troops, she, active and curiously adventurous, walked or rode about alone.
The nine-hundred-acred Brale house topped the hill not far away; the owner, a fine old planter, lived there with the survivors of his family. Six months before, an infantry regiment had bivouacked on the place. A lieutenant, sent on the reasonable suspicion that a number of escaped Confederates were harbored on the premises, clattered up, with an escort, to demand them. The eldest son, with true sullen Confederate pluck, refused him admission. After no long parley, the infantry lieutenant, losing control of himself, shot him dead: a proceeding, which, when it came to the ears of the authorities, cost the bully his commission. The two other sons, Julian and Stephen, were then in the Southern army; the younger had since perished from fever. To this doomed and outraged household, shut in from the world, hopelessly embittered against the Government in whose name murder and devastation stalked, Colonel Willoughby appeared as a new and strange being. He made it his business to see that there were no trespassings, and that the Brales lived not only in peace, but in comfort. He rode out repeatedly to the picket-lines, where a goodly quantity of commissary supplies, spirits, flour, tobacco, tea, and coffee, and divers other necessaries difficult to obtain, were handed over to the slaves in exchange for the chickens, milk, and eggs. On several occasions, he had ridden as far as the door, once to give the married daughter her pass through the lines; once to bring her little girl, who was ill, some delicacies sent in a hamper from his own home. These things broke the proud Brale hearts. They barely thanked him; his Federal uniform was like a dagger in their eyes. But a while ago, when they heard that his wife and his sister were coming to Braleton from the north, the stately old squire had sent him a royal gift, with a short letter in the style of the last century. The gift was Molly, the beautiful black, famous all over the country for her strength and speed; and on her back was a saddle of magnificent workmanship, with a movable pommel, which might be adjusted to suit the ladies. While these were in camp, therefore, the Colonel rode Messenger, his stocky sorrel, and Adela or Cecily sat majestically enthroned upon the majestic Molly. The former was a horsewoman of experience, erect, neat, orthodox, approved of connoisseurs everywhere. But the regiment was in this, as in other things, all for the favorite; and when she came in sight, (with the dare-devil mare going it, six leaps to a mile,) lying flat forward, like her own cavalrymen, with breathless, laughing face, and hair shaken loose along Molly's mane like the sun on a torrent,—such a cheer as would go up from the distracted Eleventh! Cecily and Molly, in the tingling pine-odorous Braleton air, made a familiar and joyful spectacle.
South from the mansion lay an Episcopal chapel, now dismantled, with a squat, broad, mossy roof pulled down over its eaves like a garden-hat; and around it spread the small old churchyard, with its stones neck-deep in freshening grass and clover. From this point there was a most lovely view over the melancholy landscape, silvered midway with a winding stream. Hither Cecily loved to climb, tying Molly in the copse below, to lie upon the shaded escutcheoned tomb of one Reginald Brale, "borne in Salop in olde Ingland," and to muse long and happily, forgetful of battles, on
"The great good limpid world, so still, so still!"
She and Robert Blanchard had had much constant companionship; it was natural that these musings should turn much, and indeed more and more, upon him. Surely, he was like no one else; and his presence gave Cecily a sense of infinite rest. She, too, had her obedient energies and controlled fervors. A great crisis like this, holding great issues, brought the two so sensitive to it very near together. She felt under her, even as he did, the tide-wave of patriotic emotion, sweeping the more generous spirits from all our cities out upon its fatal crest. She had seen the companies marching to the front through awe-stricken crowds, watched for the bulletins, worked for the hospitals, heard the triumphal never-to-be-forgotten eloquence and music sacred to the returning dead at home, and felt to the full the heartache and enthusiasm of all the early war. These things had formed her, pervaded her, projected her out of herself, and brought her, lingeringly a child, into thought and womanhood. Before she knew herself for an abolitionist, the day of Sumter swept over her like a flood, and diverted all the little idle streams of her being. Her brothers found her against the old tree in the garden, the newspaper in her hand, like one entranced; and one of them, soon to devote his youth to the cause of Michael against Lucifer, forbade her being teased to account for her mood. Unlike Robert, Cecily came of a soldier race, and from swords drawn, each in its generation, at Naseby, at Brandywine, at Monterey. That fortune seemed good to her which had led her to Virginia, a ground balancing in the scales of fate, and rich already with hallowed graves. To the living men about her, she was as march-music never out of their ears, to hold them to their vows. Subdued from common cares, Cecily was in the current of the national peril, inspiring and inspired, and open to every warmth and chill of it as if it were indeed her own.
She was on the hills, reading, in balmy February weather, when she became aware of a low whinny at her ear. The Brale paddocks were on the other side of the fence. A young colt was there, startled and timid, stretching towards her; then another came as near, and another, and the heads of the older horses, confiding, appealing, crowded over these. She patted their tremulous nostrils, divining instantly that something had occurred to alarm them. She raised herself from Reginald Brale's venerable slab, and listened; the sharp ping! ping! of blank cartridges struck the oak-leaves on her left. Standing, and peering down the steeper side of the incline, she saw the familiar moving glitter of gold braid, far below; and, stripping a bough, and knotting her handkerchief, she made a signal of distress, and waved it vigorously. The shout that followed told her that danger was over, both for the gentle intelligent creatures in the enclosure, and for her; the reports ceased. A moment after, a man sprang over the churchyard wall from the road. It was the Sergeant, more excited than he dared show.
"Miss Carter!" His heart-thuds made it hard for him to be punctilious. "Are you hurt? Idiots that we were to choose this place! We might have known. Tell me you're not hurt, Miss Carter." "I am not hurt at all," she answered gayly, "nor even frightened. It was these dear four-legged 'rebs' who were frightened." She slipped her book in her pocket, and took up her gloves and the dainty whip which Molly had never felt, save when it flicked a fly from her ear. "You are a brave soul!" the Sergeant said. Cecily took refuge in the significant flippancy of gamins: "You're another!" which was so apposite that they both laughed. As they descended the rough foot-path, the Sergeant longed to offer his arm; but he knew her stoicisms, her natural physical savoir-faire, and he chivalrously refrained. How nimble and graceful, how fawn-like she was! He noted the wide lace collar and the brooch at her chin; the sober Gordon plaid gown, not too long; the firm little wrist; the beautiful hair parted, and looped low.
"What were you doing just now?"
"A party of us were enjoying ourselves, shooting."
"Birds?" in a cold, regretful tone.
"Birds! No. A soldier, unless he is spoiling with garrison idleness, won't waste his genius for killing on innocent birds and their like. Besides, the artillery fellows over yonder have scared them away from the whole neighborhood. We were target-shooting with pistols. Oh, if you knew the hot coals and icicles I had to swallow when I recognized you up there!" He looked ahead, and saw with joy that his companions had departed. "Here is Molly, and my bay is behind the rock. May I ride home with you?" He helped her to mount, and sprang into his own saddle. The lonely, lovely earth and sky were theirs together; they went slowly, slowly down to the ford. Molly was thirsty, or else perverse; for she paused, lowered her aristocratic little head, and began to drink. Presently Saladin, the bay, standing by her on the brink, did the same; and the two riders sat, perforce, conscious of their like silent sympathy and society. An impulse rushed on each to lean over towards the other also, to lay cheek to happy cheek over the shallow water, in their youth, in the sun. The Sergeant stiffened himself with an effort.
"Although it is a holiday," he said, scanning the distance, "and although there's no end of jollity afoot, greased poles, football, leap-frog, hurdle-races, and all that—and did you know that Mrs. Willoughby, escorted by the Colonel and the Adjutant, had gone for the day? There are to be charming diversions at the infantry camp, and a ball to wind up with. You were asked, too, I hear; but you missed it, straying off to your hermitage."
"I am glad I did! Please finish your sentence."
"Oh, I forgot. I was going to add that this sort of relaxation, just now, might be risky, when Old Glory and I may be ordered out before morning to waltz to fife-music!"
"A battle? Do you truly think it likely?"
"I half believe it. I don't mind telling you I have a premonition of it, involving another premonition regarding myself. But what of it? Our old friend Cicero, I think it was, used to say that we are born not for ourselves, but for the Republic." He laughed, as if he had said a jocund thing. He had not meant then to test her feeling for him; but he had allies in the hour and its emotion. Cecily rejoiced in his cheerful acceptances, and remembered her impersonal pride in the circumstances of his enlistment, of which she had heard on all sides at home. Her voice fell, unawares, into its shy inflections, its little wild spontaneous minors, as she said, seeing the horses rear their heads: "Will you please tell me, Sergeant Blanchard, how you came to join the army? All that I know is that you were abroad, and that you gave up your pleasure, and came back."
He began quietly, as they passed the stream and made for higher ground:
"It is quite a story. I was off on a tour through India and Egypt, with my college chum, my dear old Arthur Hughes. Neither of us had any notion of returning home, and we were in the middle of the best time two fellows ever had on this earth, when I had a queer sort of warning. We were both curled up on the window-sill of my room, in our hotel at Cairo, one hot night, sleepless, and enjoying a smoke. Suddenly, above the street, among the shadows and spangled points of all those near domes and pinnacles, I saw what I thought was our national flag, hanging, hardly stirring. It seemed to spring up out of nothing, in its familiar, varied colors, to startle my eye. Then, in a moment, I perceived that it was no flag, but a living spirit, a genius, a guardian angel, whatever you like to call it, which bore the oddest resemblance to one. There before me was the dreamiest figure; a tall beautiful young woman in a helmet, the moon shining on the little spike of it. A long blue veil, bluer than the atmosphere, covered her face, and was blown about her shoulders, not so heavy of texture but that the jewels in her flowing hair flashed through it with wonderful lustres; and her garment fell away in long alternate whites and reds, like the liquid bars we sometimes see flushing and paling in our own sky in the north, when the aurora borealis comes in the March evenings. There she floated many minutes before fading away; and once she raised her veil and beckoned, and her eyes dwelt on me so imploringly that they have become more real to me than anything else in my life. I tell you it shook my heart.... Miss Carter, if you will allow me, I must say that the vision was like, was very like,"—the Sergeant choked a little,—"like you. When I first saw you, I was so startled, it gave me, well, almost a swoon. That is a novel word, and ludicrous, perhaps, but I can use no other. At any rate, the resemblance has drawn me towards you, I can't say how strongly or how much. Please forgive me." For Cecily's wild-rose face was warm.
"I had forgotten all about Arthur. But when I turned to clutch him in my excitement, my first glance told me that he had not seen the phantom, and that he would deride my faith in it. So I tried to laugh off my sudden attack of second-sight; but it was of no use. I dropped into silence when it was my turn to speak, and abandoning presently the effort to seem indifferent, I parted from him, and went to bed.
"It was the only ghostly thing that had ever happened to me, and it impressed me tremendously. For my part, I could get no rest by day or night; that influence was over me like a bad star. I racked my brain to explain it by natural agencies, and it only set me thinking the more of our blessed country being in some terrible trouble. When I came to that, I jumped up and started for the bath, to cool off, and then changed my mind, and struck first for the ticket-office. Whom should I knock into on the way but old Arthur in his fez, fierce as a lion. 'Bob,' he said, dragging me into a booth, 'it's war, war! President Lincoln is calling for men, and I'm going home to spite the devil.' 'There's no choice. I am going home anyhow,' I said. 'What news is there?'
"The little which had travelled that far, I heard from him. Sumter was being fired upon, on the 11th of April, 1861, when I saw Our Lady of the Union. I call her that; but I never spoke of her to Arthur, or to any one. Before June set in we arrived in New York, and we volunteered. Arthur has distinguished himself right and left. He is in Andersonville now, dear fellow. I should hate to end there."
"A martyr is a martyr; the place matters nothing," the girl replied.
"I know," he said; "I did not mean to speak lightly; but I am one of those who cannot always avoid it when they feel much."The Sergeant's cheeks were burning too, and he quickened his pace. Cecily did not speak, following the bounding bay. But a loneliness which she could not define came upon her; a resentment of the sacred ideal which could yet be to her friend his divinity, his beauty, his bride, in a world from which she was shut out as an irrelevance. And almost as soon, she questioned herself whether because of a tie dearer than the human, this golden-hearted Robert must lose, she in him must lose—what? For answer, the noble and foolish tears welled up from the depths, and fell into the folds across her knee. Her companion drew his own rein, and laid his hand upon Molly's.
"Oh, why do you cry? I can't bear it. What have I done?"
"Nothing."
"I did not intend to disturb you, to make you care about it, or pity me; I am much happier since that happened. Could it be—oh, could it be—" He gazed a moment upon her, absorbedly and absorbingly, and she turned away. For who can make conscious preparation for the imminent? Sudden ever is the finger of Death, to the watchers; sudden also is Love.
They were under the shade of some giant pines. The young man vaulted lightly to the ground, close to Molly's satin stirrupless flank, his hands clasped, his head thrown back, fired with adoring hope. When Cecily inclined towards him again, he saw in her (or was it his bewitched fancy?) the remote, incredible radiance of his old day-dream. The great flush rolled responsive to his own clear brow. He shook himself free, and found his voice. "Cecily," he said simply, "I love you; you must know that I love you. Such a love has no beginning and no end. You understand that and me. Of myself I have nothing to say. You have seen me only among Willoughby's recruits; but I never wished to be elsewhere. Judge of me, as we two are, now and here. Can you, do you think you could be my wife, by and by? Tell me. Tell me!" Then Cecily, simple too, in the same tremor of exaltation, put out her right hand. He caught at it with both his own, and buried his face there. His wide hat had fallen; the warm light was on his clustering hair. With a sweet instinct like motherliness, his maid, bending over, kissed it in benediction.
It was two o'clock when they crossed the ford, and the late afternoon found them still pacing on their roadless way, like the lost enchanted knight and lady of the Black Forest. They were less than a mile from Braleton, on the rocks, in sight of the tents, when they unsaddled and tethered the horses, and made the last halt. "Dearest," the Sergeant had said, lying at her feet, his elbow in the grass, "dedicate my sword." Raising himself, he made a motion as if drawing it, and held it towards her and the sunset; Cecily, in the same pretty pantomime, touched her lips to the viewless blade, priestess of a new investiture. "One thing we both love better than ourselves; is it not so?" She was not jealous now. "These United States, right or wrong!"
"Oh, no!" The soldier sheathed his sacred weapon. "Say justice, liberty, the rights of man; the things our United States ought to stand for." Then the light heart in him laughed; and Concrete and Abstract blessed each other. Happy and silent, they lingered on the brow of the pine copse; a breeze sprang up; vast and gorgeous sky-colors spread and deepened. The Sergeant's uplifted face was fixed upon his betrothed. She seemed to dissolve away before him, or before him, rather, to be vivified and set free. Slowly between her and him, transubstantiating her touching beauty, gathered a solemn, changeful, wavering cloud-splendor of ivory, rose, and sapphire, gathered out of the land of myths into recognized and unforgotten fact. For a quarter of an hour he endured that mystical glory; then his head dropped forward on her knees. A thing seen was yet upon him: once more Our Lady of the Union, but with a smile as if of one assured at last of ransom, and ineffably content. When Cecily touched him, wondering, he shuddered, and brushed an imagined film from his eyes. She sat there, innocent of any magic, unaware in what potter's hand her spirit was so much fine clay.
From the depths of the vale the croak of frogs arose, faint here and shriller there, then long-drawn and general: ever a most mournful, homesick, and foreboding sound to our armies in the South. The distant camp seemed ominously quiet; but on the outskirts of it was a dissolving shadow, a moving dark clot, there, a moment back, between them and the scarce-fluttering flag, and still there, now that the flag was hauled down, its bright hues effaced against the more vivid evening air. Presently the group of men, for such it was, scattered. Cecily's keen sight read what was written afar; the familiar figure of the one-armed brisk Lieutenant-Colonel in the saddle coming towards the hill, with others following on the gallop behind.
"You are needed," she said without preamble; "you must go to them." With emphasis and authority, slight and quick, yet irrevocable, she spoke. He turned about, and sprang to his feet from his enchantment at her side; for the divine day, the Sergeant's field-day, was over. "Is this the way of women, or only your way? You send me from you on a supposition, a scruple," he answered, plaintively."Go." She repeated it softly, and with closed eyes, lest she should look upon her own heart-break. "It is unnecessary, as you know," he replied; "but if you make it a point of honor, I am glad to obey." He held out his hands, and she took them, cherishing, steadfast, as in a pact. Her voice and step were strangely unsteady; they held up the mirror, as it were, to his. What was there in a commonplace incident to move them so to the depth? In a passionate presentiment, he drew her closer to him. "Are we to be given to each other only that we may be severed, and suffer the more? What if the end should be now? Cecily!"
But the young heroic mettle rose to meet his. "Beloved, you are mine and not mine. You are consecrated for the term of the war; so am I. I will always give you up to your task. Perhaps you may measure by that whether I love you." He looked down with a grateful sigh on her who so mysteriously held him to his sacrifice, and shared it, and through her and in her, on the old, old fate which he knew now was driving him to the cliff."If there is to be a fight, I want your flag, the flag you made!" he whispered, grasping at anything to hide this rending in him of the spirit from the flesh. "However, whenever I fall, I want to be buried in it. Is it done? May I take it for mine, before it is presented to the regiment?"
"Yes. You shall carry my colors here and in heaven. I will pray for my knight."
He kissed her once, twice, for the betrothal, and yet again for the farewell.
He took Molly, the fresher animal of the two, and spurred to the open ground below, breaking out from the wood-path, ready for any duty, on time. He looked illumined, detached, transfigured: a Saint Michael to be remembered after by his companions in the moral crises of their lives. The Lieutenant-Colonel drew rein, relieved. "I was wishing for you, of all people," he said; "I feared you were far away. There has been an alarm; we must sleep under arms. The Colonel and most of the officers have not returned. I will go back now. Take these six with you, and cross the railway tracks to Palmer's. It is a rough road, and a long journey; but report as soon as you can." The Sergeant started with his bayoneted cavalcade in a dash westward. Cecily, apprehensive of something unusual, saw the slow-rising dust, and, ahead of it, the erect leader, scaling the horizon, and vanishing into the yet glowing sky. A pang unutterable tore her; but, uttered, it would have been none other than Amen.
Poor Saladin was tired enough, having been out all day long; and Cecily led him carefully to the plain. Every clapping leaf, every crackling twig underfoot, struck a chill into her bosom, on the over-shadowing hill-slopes. She had played too brave a part under her mental turmoil, and in the presence of her lover, himself too easily enamoured of death. A spell greater than any he had felt was over her, breathing a blackness between her and the light. Now her ample courage was fast giving out. She saw a face in the thicket, and was barely able to nerve herself not to scream. A man, in a military dress she did not know, came forward, and raised his cap. It was Major Julian Brale, free at last to do some scouting over his ancestral acres, alone, and with hot revenges in his heart. He was sorry for her, and angry at her discovery. He apologized briefly, and helped her to mount, not without concern, but with a scornful coldness of manner which he could not help. When she had gone, he returned to the bushes, cursing the Eleventh; for he had recognized the saddle on the bay. The two forces were on the brink of battle; but he was not an expert sharp-shooter for nothing, and if he could but get sight of that thief, that coward, that hell-born villain who had taken his old father's precious Molly from him— A moonbeam straggled in where he bent over, priming his rifle, and he moved from it into the dark.
Dinnerless, supperless, much too overwrought to go to bed, Cecily Carter sat in the Colonel's empty tent. For company, she had shaken out her great silken banner over the lounge, where the firelight, falling on it, seemed to praise its divine destroying loveliness with a poet's Pentecostal tongue. Once she murmured prayerfully: "Dear Robert, dear Robert." Something not herself had bade him go, and he was gone; there was all of herself now in these fears. The little parting from him which she was enduring became magnified and abiding, so that she looked upon him slain, and thought with a sort of joyous satisfaction how under the buttons of his old blue jacket, where nobody, not even his mother, knew of them, were rose-leaves all about the open wound next his heart; rose-leaves pressed most fervently, one by one, to her lips, and laid there. Other caress she could not give him; though she was his, he was the Republic's, for ever and ever. Again, she saw him carried on a howitzer to a green lonely place. A stone reared itself before her, and she read upon it an odd inscription: If ye seek the summit of true honor, hasten with all speed into that heavenly country. She started up. Was her brain indeed giving way? Who had spoken? Where had she heard those words? How piercing a beauty they had! Were they in the Church ritual? What did they mean? Why should they hound her from her rest?
The Colonel's little ormolu clock struck eleven. Almost on the stroke, the delayed revellers entered. Adela could not fail to notice her sister's nervousness, but attributed it to anxiety for herself. The Sultana of the Surgeon's christening had been prodigally feasted and flattered; she had come home with an armful of hothouse flowers, effulgent with gratification, and in a talking mood. The Colonel's boy brought in the lamps. When the Colonel himself followed, grown grim with the sudden tension and commotion about, his remark was to the point. "I'm afraid you women will have to get out of camp, quick. I smell powder. It is likely to be damned disagreeable." His handsome, worldly wife, coming, butterfly-like, in yellow, out of her dark wrappings, fixed him with her censorious eye. "James Willoughby! You have been drinking." He was wont, on such occasions, to cast a comical appealing glance at Cecily, of whom he was fond. She did not smile in return, and her pallor touched him; so that he went over to her at once. "What's the matter, child?" he asked, with affectionate anxiety. But an approaching clang and clatter, and the challenge of the sentry without, took from him what he meant to say; he left Cecily to her sister, and hurried into the air. His going added to her trouble; and yet she would have had no solace in keeping a friend near. Oh, the stress and strain of dull daily incident upon that inner universe, frangible as a bubble, where she and Robert had begun to live!—she and Robert, and the Love of Country alone, for between this and them must be union everlasting. Oh, the tyranny of all that is, laid upon him, faithful in his place; upon her, faithful in hers; the speechless dealings of lonely lovers with the Lone!
Private Cobbe, being foremost, saluted breathlessly: "Colonel, the pickets are being driven in; the enemy is advancing." The gallant fellow pressed his hand to his thigh; he was wounded, and he was soldier enough to feel that wound an ignominy which had been received obscurely, and elsewhere than on the field. Immediately, all along the tents, arose the multitudinous yet unconfused cries of "Form!" and "Fall in!" from the captains; the flapping guidons were borne hither and thither to their places, and the thousand horses, wheeling on their dancing hoofs by the gleam of lantern and torch under the watery moon, began to make huge, fantastic shadows along the old parade-ground. The Colonel, drawing on his gauntlets, and still afoot, noticed for the first time that Cobbe and McGrath held between them, each with an arm around him, an officer. For an instant, in the imperfect light, he thought him some prisoner, until he recognized, in a flash, Molly with her great liquid, excited eyes, Molly with her even mane hanging wet and limp, confronting him. Private McGrath had held in until now. He blurted: "I'm afraid he's gone, sir." The Colonel took a step forward, as if it were into eternity. The Surgeon, standing by, echoed after him: "My God!"
They lifted their friend down together, and carried him in, and laid him with extreme gentleness where by chance the new flag, a kingly winding-sheet, was above him and under. The Surgeon bent very low for a while over the lounge. The many in the tent, used to calamity less great than the loss of their best, held their breath; the Adjutant's dog, close to his master's legs, lifted his long gray throat and crooned softly and mournfully, as the band outside, far down the disparting columns, broke into a loud, thrilling strain, impatient for victory. The Sergeant was dead, with a ball in his breast. No one moved until Cecily groaned and dropped.
